Van Stone Keeps Commission Seat

As the clock ticked toward midnight Tuesday, the possibility that he could lose faced incumbent Bonner County Commissioner Dale Van Stone.

The margin between him and challenger Tom Clark had eroded until Clark was just a few votes away from taking the lead.

“It was a tight race - right down to the wire,” Van Stone said Wednesday.

Van Stone and Clark’s race was the closest of the races in one of the toughest county election seasons in recent history.

Van Stone wound up with 52 percent of the vote, or 5,543 votes to Clark’s 5,108 votes.

Clark’s supporters are questioning the results, however.

One poll-watcher is asking why an unsealed box of absentee ballots was mixed in to be counted with the last precinct - perhaps helping to widen the margin between Van Stone and Clark.

“We think it’s highly suspicious that this huge stack of absentee ballots came in without a seal,” said Edgar Steele of the Bonner County Taxpayers Association, of which the poll-watcher is a member.

Bonner County Clerk Marie Scott said a formal challenge of the results is possible, but none had been made Wednesday.

Scott and Bonner County Prosecutor Phil Robinson said they’re satisfied no one tampered with the ballots. Those 89 absentee ballots had arrived election day and there wasn’t time to get them to their individual precincts, Scott said. The box was padlocked, but precinct workers simply neglected to attach a seal to it, she said.

Scott was also engaged in a tight race against Jacque Schremser. Scott won with 53 percent, or 5,781 votes.

Scott and Van Stone attribute their close calls to The Bonner Examiner, a tabloid that was distributed late in the campaign by Steele’s group. The tabloid attacked the incumbent commissioners and clerk.

“The yellow journalism of the Examiner had an effect,” Scott said. “I feel good that the majority of the voters recognized the innuendos and false accusations for exactly what they were.”

The strong feelings that accompanied some of the campaigns prompted Scott to ask for a strong police presence at the courthouse Tuesday night. No incidents were reported.

Brian Orr, who won the commissioners race against incumbent Larry Allen, thought the police presence was unwarranted.

“It was pretty civil,” Orr said.

Allen is certain the tabloid helped cost him the race. Orr won with 6,656 votes, or 61 percent.

“I wasn’t surprised that Brian won, but that it was by such a large margin,” said Allen, who’s spending the rest of the week away from the courthouse recovering from the tough election.

“I’m simply not a politician,” Allen said.

Allen was opposed not only by the Taxpayers Association, but also by People for Sensible Government, a political action committee that backed mostly Democrats. He said he was hurt by misinformation from both sides.

Orr, on the other hand, thinks that voters were ready for a change, although he concedes that the tabloid may have hurt Allen’s chances.

Orr said he was worried that Van Stone would be defeated, leaving him the minority on a very conservative commission dominated by Clark and Bud Mueller.

“I would have been an isolated commissioner without Dale,” Orr said.

The other candidates were unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Van Stone was the subject of an article in the tabloid that accused him of extorting money out of the school district and trying to locate a county dump site near his property so he could access his neighboring property for development purposes.

“There was nothing they could prove. It was all accusations,” he said. Still, it almost cost him the election.

“A lot of people bought into the tabloid thing and thought it was true,” Van Stone said.

Steele insists the tabloid is true and said the group would like to publish another one, if it could afford it.

In the only other contested county race, Assessor Paul Votava lost to James Boatwright. The unofficial final results show that Boatwright had 5,993 votes, or 55 percent, to Votava’s 4,884 votes.